In an all-communicating world, as we are experiencing today, media types such as voice, data, images and video are conveniently communicated anywhere and anytime in the world, thereby increasing quality of life and productivity, and enabling a more resource efficient world. Messaging is a key-service for end-users in such a world. In such a world, people shall be enabled to send and receive messages in their preferred manner, without caring about capabilities of their communication partners.
To enrich end-user experience and allow the end-user more freedom in choosing media formats, capabilities of messaging services are continuously improved. These improvements, however, should not lead to a fragmentation of the set of addressable communication partners for users of new technologies. I.e. it should not lead to a situation where a user of a new messaging service or technology can only communicate with other users that are enabled for the new messaging service or technology. Therefore, efforts are made to support features for interworking between new and well-established messaging technologies to allow a smooth migration into a world of integrated messaging.
With the advent of multimedia and 3G in the telecommunication area, an important technical break-through has come. It is no longer necessary to consider the type of media that should be the base for the communication and dependant on that media decide how to communicate. Neither is it necessary to consider place or time and base the choice of communication means on those factors.
Technically, 3G and multimedia allows communicating anywhere, anytime using any media type (video, voice, image and text) and combinations of them.
Still, the introduction initially creates a fragmentation of communication capabilities, as it is impossible to upgrade all users to the latest technology in one step. The success of SMS and mobile telephony in general shows the importance of services to work with an almost self-understanding reliability.
As mentioned above, it has been discovered that the end-user would like to decide how to communicate entirely based on his/her current communication need. E.g. an end-user that sends a message would like to be able to send the message in a format suitable for his/her current needs, and the end-user that receives the message would like to receive the message in a format suitable for his/her current needs.
Most prior art solutions for enabling messaging between end-users, or from an originator of a message to a recipient of a message, are based on vertical architectures, wherein each messaging solution stands alone, i.e. has its own functionality for provisioning, service management etc. FIG. 1 shows a communication system having a vertical messaging architecture, which is commonly deployed by operators today. Here, each messaging service or message type, e.g. Messaging over IP (MoIP), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), Instant Messaging (IM), Short Message Services (SMS), brings with it its own client, e.g. SMS client, MMS client and Instant Messaging and Presence Services (IMPS) client, installed at the end user domain, and its own Service Centre, e.g. MoIP centre, Multimedia messaging Centre (MMC), SMS-C and IMPS service centre. In this solution each service centre has its own message store, its own user directory, own notification server and sometimes own O&M system. The MoIP service centre is the Ericsson system for handling Voice mail, Web mail and Email services. This vertical messaging architecture also has some functions in the Service Network Domain in common for the different messaging services, such as a Common directory and common functions for Provisioning, Charging, O&M and Authentication. It also has Border gateways for communication to other networks, e.g. Voice gateway, Push proxy gateway and WAP gateway. The communication system is also provided with connections to a business management domain, a network management domain and an application domain. The connection to the application domain is enabled via a Value Added Service Provider gateway (VASP GW). A Multimedia Library (MML) is also provided which stores e.g. MMS messages to users. The MML also enables for a user to access other multimedia content from the MML. Thereby, the MML functions as storage, content retrieval enabler and enables sharing of messages.
From experience in deploying vertical solutions, it is clear that the lack of common functionality increases integration and maintenance costs 10-fold for every additional node or messaging solution in the system. Also, experience shows that vertical solutions have extremely long time to market for deployment of communication services, such as mobile services. Therefore, there is a demand from e.g. operators and other providers of communication services to shift from a vertical messaging architecture towards a horizontal messaging architecture, where certain functionality are in common for the different messaging services.
As stated above there is a need for a user to be able to communicate with anyone based on the user's own current communication need and communication capabilities. Also, there is a need for operators to be able to provide horizontal messaging solutions/architectures such that the messaging architecture could easily be added with a new messaging technology handling a new message type.
In the application, a message type is defined as the messages handled by a certain messaging server. E.g. normally an Email server handles the message type Emails, a Voice mail server handles the message type Voice mails and an MMS server handles the message type MMS messages. Also, it may be possible that one messaging server handles more than one kind of messages. Then, the term message type may actually include more than one kind of messages, e.g. MMS and SMS.